Category Archives: Archive

Blog: Actual Human Physics – 08/21/19

On numerous occasions I’ve mentioned my particular fondness for physics-based wackiness, but looking through the history of this site I don’t think I’ve actually talked about one of my favorite examples of that. If you haven’t heard of it, allow me to put Human Fall Flat on your radar, because it’s damn good fun.

Human Fall Flat isn’t a new game. It was released a little over 3 years ago on PC, but eventually made its way to just about every platform out there. In Human Fall Flat, you play as a little blob person who must traverse through various levels filled with puzzles and platforming challenges. At face value it doesn’t sound particularly exciting, but it’s the wild physics that you’ll be battling that makes things interesting.

Puzzles usually require you figuring out how to hit a switch, breaking through a wall, piloting a vehicle or just maneuvering through tricky terrain. All of this is made more exciting as you’re trying to reign in the wily physics or preferably, exploiting them to break the level and circumvent the obstacle entirely.

It’s a goofy experience that only gets better when you get your friends in on the chaos. The game supports 2 players locally (on PC at least) and up to 8 players via online play. I’ve played through this game both single player and with another person, and I cannot fathom what kind of shit show it turns into with 8 people.

And “shit show” might actually be the most accurate descriptor of Human Fall Flat because of just how bonkers things can get. You might find yourself flying through the air, or flipping a vehicle with your bare hands or something because the physics went bonkers. But that’s what I love about the game. I can solve the puzzles and traverse the obstacles as intended in a pretty quick fashion, but it’s when you decide to go off the beaten path that Human Fall Flat really shines. It really is a case of, “if you think you can do it, you probably can.”

The problem is that there’s only a handful of official levels in the game at the moment that offer limited replay value. Creating a level filled with puzzles and branching paths can’t be easy, so this isn’t me complaining as much as it is me yearning for more stuff to fool around with. Luckily there’s Steam Workshop support which has enabled people to create their own nightmarish levels for me to bang my head against. I think I’ve downloaded about 20 levels at this point, and have only been able to conquer about half of them, which is fine because it’s more game for to play and I wont grouse about that. But here’s a tip for you custom level makers out there: put some fucking checkpoints in your levels.

The unfortunate truth is that Human Fall Flat is one of those games that when you see it, it’ll either click with you or not. While writing this, it was announced that a new level was coming to the game come August 27th, so that’s something to look forward to. I can’t properly express my love for this game without showing it off to people or letting them get their hands on it, but if you get the opportunity to try it, please do.

Blog: Everyone Needs to Calm Down – 08/14/19

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Late last year the Epic Games Launcher was released to much cynicism and side eyeing from the gaming audience, myself included. I won’t lie, I was very skeptical of the product and in some regards I still am, but I’m ultimately glad to see that there’s some real competition in the PC games marketplace for once. My issues with the Epic Games Launcher are mostly directed towards the very limited feature set which to be fair, they’re working on, but most of the anger and vitriol amidst the discourse revolves around how “aggressive” Epic appears when lining up exclusives.

A few months ago, Metro Exodus was gearing up for its PC release on Steam. It had been available for pre-order on Steam for quite a while and people were eager to play it. Weeks before it launched however, it was announced that the game would be a timed exclusive on the Epic Games Store. The Steam pre-orders would be honored and activated on release day, but people were not happy with the abrupt jump to this new platform. I’m guessing that was the start of everyone getting angry with the platform in general. Even I thought it was a questionable move, but I also had no intention to play Metro Exodus, so I moved on.

Since then, Epic has been courting developers of all sizes, encouraging them to release on their platform and enjoy a healthier cut of profits from sales. There should be no question that developers should get paid for the work they put into making these games, and if there’s a platform out there that better facilitates that, then it’s an easy decision to make.

But the internet is still a nightmare emporium where people will take any reason to raise their pitchforks and try to ruin the lives of others. That’s where Ooblets comes in. Ooblets is a game that appears to be mixing the elements of Animal Crossing and Pokemon together into one colorfully charming experience. Unfortunately, this post isn’t about how excited I am to check the game out (which I am), instead it’s about how on July 31st the studio behind the game announced that they were signing a deal with the Epic Games Store for a few reasons, income being the primary motivator. Let’s be clear, an indie studio doing what they have to in order to get paid more for there work is not something we should be grousing about. Developers need money to survive, and if the Epic Games Store is offering them a bigger cut alongside of a signing bonus, they should take that opportunity.

I bet you can guess what happened next. See, the team behind Ooblets put out a pretty hilarious and snarky blog post outlining the decision, while also making fun of how much people on the internet lose their minds when they hear about Epic grabbing another exclusive. I thought it was pretty hilarious but the internet did not. The internet found it so unfunny in fact, that they responded in some pretty shitty ways including racial slurs and death threats. You know, completely rational responses to a video game going to another store.

WARNING: If you want to see some of the garbage people have said, it’s here, but there’s some really horrific stuff in there, so click at your own risk.

So here we are in the aftermath of all of this, left with yet another tragic example of targeted hate campaigns over the stupidest and most inconsequential shit. The amount of hatred and anger over this move should seem unbelievable, but unfortunately the internet continues to remain a smoldering crater full of mutants with keyboards. I don’t have the solution to this problem, I can only encourage people to spare a thought for the people behind the product. It isn’t worth getting so wound up over a game that you verbally assault someone or threaten them. Nothing should prompt you to be that kind of person, especially not a video game.

It’s a shame that the developers and their insanely charming game have to be associated with this nonsense and I hope the developers are able to rise above the noise and push on. I’ve been interested in Ooblets for quite a while now and fully intended on playing it, regardless of what storefront it eventually wound up on.

Maybe it’s hard for people to wrap their heads around how to install a new launcher. Maybe they don’t like having two whole icons on their desktop for game related things. Those excuses are bullshit. None of it is worth threatening people. Get the fuck over yourselves.

Building a New Splinter Cell

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A YouTube channel named NoClip, recently released a documentary series about the rebooted Hitman games of the past few years. It highlighted developer IO Interactive and their separation from Square Enix, the way they designed their levels and AI patterns, as well as some other very interesting tidbits about their struggles and accomplishments. You should check it out. But it got me thinking about another stealth-action franchise that could use the same rebooting treatment that Hitman received. Of course I’m speaking of Splinter Cell.

Just like the Hitman franchise, Splinter Cell has had some really good entries in the series, and some not so great ones. Hitman eventually pivoted off of a divisive release in the form of Hitman Absolution, into the phenomenal Hitman 2016. Absolution was a fairly linear game that tried to follow in the steps of popular action games of the time, ultimately betraying the core conceit of what those games were traditionally like. Hitman 2016 threw linearity out the window and placed you into clockwork, systems driven levels that had dozens of way to approach them, with multiple objectives for you to complete, a bevy of disguises and weapons at your disposal, and plenty of over-the-top methods for you to dispatch your targets.

But it isn’t the only tried and true stealth-action franchise that made drastic changes to the formula. In a similar fashion, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain did something of a soft reboot in terms of its mechanics and play style, favoring an open world and systemic driven design as opposed to a more curated one. It wasn’t without it’s issues, but most people can agree that it was the best playing Metal Gear, despite having a middling story at best.

So I got to thinking, if Hitman and Metal Gear could reboot themselves so successfully, Splinter Cell should be able to as well. While it’s easy to say that Splinter Cell should just do the same thing those games did, it can’t. There are fundamental differences in the way those games play that just don’t translate perfectly. But if we were to cherry pick elements from either of those games to slot into a new Splinter Cell, I bet you’d come back with something pretty good.

In Hitman 2016, you’re infiltrating these massive and mostly public spaces, adopting the persona and disguise of whomever you need to be in order to gain access to some of the more guarded targets. You’re usually trying to get rid of some sleazy rich guy who’s throwing a party or staying at a hotel or something. There are more “public” spaces for you to occupy and plan around, making it feel more like a puzzle game than anything else.

In Metal Gear Solid V, you’re infiltrating various military installments spread throughout this massive open world, returning to your home base every so often to cash in your missions or progress the story. There isn’t a ton of variety in the way you actually approach these missions, but you’ve got a pretty impressive tool kit at your disposal, from a rocket powered arm that you can shoot into the faces of your enemies, to a dog that wields a knife in its mouth and will cut fools up at your behest.

Splinter Cell is different kind of game in those regards, striving to be a more grounded depiction of military efficacy than the other stealth-action franchises. That established ideology about what those games do makes it difficult to open up the floodgates and allow for more of the weird shenanigans that Metal Gear and Hitman allow for, and Sam Fisher as a protagonist isn’t exactly the “dressing up like a clown and sneaking into a birthday party” type of secret agent.

But despite all of that, here are some elements from both Metal Gear and Hitman that a new Splinter Cell should implement in a new entry.

LEVEL DESIGN

The star of the modern Hitman games is most certainly the levels that you play in. What Hitman 2016 doubled-down on were these clockwork levels that were massive sandboxes for you to explore, where NPCs had routines and goals for you to intercept and take advantage of. Almost every corner of the level provided you with some new opportunity, tool or costume for you to use to dispatch your targets. Along with that, the way the AI was scripted was such that no matter what you did or who you removed from the world, the game was able to pick it back up and make sure everything didn’t grind to a halt because you killed a particular NPC or were caught doing something.

I think that same philosophy can be applied to Splinter Cell in an extremely effective way. In Hitman, the levels all provide Agent 47 with opportunities to hide in plain sight, playing to his strengths while also providing you with a ton of variety in terms of settings and weaponry. Because Agent 47 is more focused on infiltration, the levels can be anything from an active movie studio, to the suburbs, or to a fashion show. That’s the beauty behind the core concept of Hitman.

Whereas Sam Fisher is more of a traditional spy, running military ops, sticking to the shadows and using his environment to help shield him from detection. Instead of the normal, shoot out the lights and sneak up behind a guy routine, a bigger and more complex level could afford you new opportunities to take when stalking your prey.

The problem is that Sam Fisher as a character has a pretty one-note arsenal. He’s a super effective spy who knows how to sneak around, shoot guns and climb obstacles, but he can never dress up like a hipster and pretends to be the drummer in a band so he can kill the lead singer. It’s what makes creating these more intricate levels so difficult, because nobody ever cares how Sam Fisher gets into an enemy base and kills everyone, because he’s on a mission to a dangerous place where there are rarely any civilians to worry about.

CHALLENGES

There are so many things that make Hitman levels so infinitely re-playable, but the challenges and missions have to be up there. Hitman encourages you to replay levels and approach them differently by rewarding you with experience for throwing a pair of scissors at your target’s head while dressed like a clown, or by pushing a loud speaker off the awning above them and crushing them. By completing these challenges, you’re rewarded with new outfits, starting points, and weapons you can use to flex your creativity. It’s a brilliant loop that consistently proves to be the voice in your head that says, “yeah that was cool, but how about this?”

In Splinter Cell though, you have maybe 3 or 4 ways to actually deal with your targets, and in reality you’re only going to either shoot them or strangle them. That’s kind of another big problem Splinter Cell runs into if it tries to adopt a more Hitman-like approach. How do you encourage your players to play differently, and what does that even look like? Sam Fisher doesn’t dress up in goofy outfits and he rarely hides in plain sight, so how do you make new challenges and missions within this limited tool set as well as what the audience expects from a Splinter Cell game? Without completely redefining what kind of character Sam Fisher is you get kind of locked into a box.

I personally wouldn’t mind seeing an all new Sam Fisher who gets tasked with taking down targets that aren’t purely enemy combatants, but I think people would lose their minds if he suddenly started dressing up as a waiter or something.

WEAPONRY

Some of the deadliest and most effective weapons in Hitman are often the most innocuous ones. I’ve killed more people with pasta cans, letter openers, and cheeseburgers than actual guns, because in Hitman, everything you can pick up becomes a deadly weapon. I’m willing to bet Sam Fisher is just as effective as Agent 47 when it comes to improvised weaponry, but I can’t really recall him ever exhibiting that beyond throwing a brick or a rock.

This issue seems far more surmountable than the previous ones considering that you can put plenty of flotsam and jetsam in the levels that Sam could throw at the heads of his enemies. Cinder-blocks, bottles and so on and so forth all would narratively fit in the self-serious tone of Splinter Cell. But that tone can be a little limiting in terms of what you can cram into a new Splinter Cell.

I want to see Sam Fisher try to play guitar poorly in an attempt to fool his target. Then, when he realizes that the target isn’t buying it, smashes it over their head. He might then say something like, “everyone’s a critic” and move to leave the level. But I sincerely doubt I’d ever see that.

TONE

Speaking of the self-seriousness of the franchise, we arrive at my last point. The tone of Splinter Cell, hell, the tone of all the Tom Clancy games are just so painfully self serious. That isn’t to say that striking a serious tone is a bad thing, but it is limiting if you’re trying to build out levels, opportunities and basically everything I’ve mentioned up until this point.

Even when you look at something like Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, a game that also provided players a systems driven sandbox to skulk around in, that game still had levity built into it. By Metal Gear standards it was pretty serious, but you could still do some wild stuff in that game like making your horse poop on command that would lighten the mood.

I can’t really recall anything like that happening in the Splinter Cell franchise. Sam Fisher will make the occasional quip, but he’s never drowning his targets in the toilet they’re vomiting into like you can in Hitman or confusing enemy guards with 20 inflatable dummies of himself like you do in Metal Gear.

The Tom Clancy approach to things is to make bad military humor that is funny to maybe a handful of people out there. Like, there had to be one person out there who cracked up every time a character shouted the phrase, “shitballs!” in Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands, right?

Despite my personal preference for a lighter toned game, I just think that from a design perspective it has to be easier to create fun opportunities than just the standard military fare ones. I’d rather watch the ejector seat on a jet launch a man into the sun than see a guy just shoot a guy with a sniper rifle. It’s why I appreciate the Hitman games so much. Maybe Splinter Cell just isn’t the franchise for me anymore, but if I had my way, it would be a much different game in tone.

I desperately want a new Splinter Cell game, but as time goes on I get a little more cautious about what that game looks like. Between the need to change and the desire to stay true to the existing formulas, I’d have to imagine that part of why a new Splinter Cell hasn’t been announced is because the well of ideas that exists within those confines might be running dry. I just hope that if there ever is a new Splinter Cell game, whatever it turns out to be, it manages to keep me playing for as long as the Hitman reboots have.

Blog: A Hike I Like – 08/07/19

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Last week, a delightful little game was released on Steam called A Short Hike. It’s about your character, an anthropomorphic bird lady, who decided to get away from it all and head out to the mountains with her aunt. Your goal is simple: make your way to the top of the tallest mountain so you can get cellphone reception. At first blush it seems pretty absurd, but very quickly you find that you’re expecting an extremely important phone call from a family member.

So you head off through the woods to find a way up to the peak of the mountain. Naturally, it wouldn’t be as simple as just going there. You lack the physical capabilities to properly scale said mountain when you start out. Soon after that realization, you encounter a mechanic that quite simply put, is a stamina meter. You need to collect these golden feathers that expand your capacity for physical activity. Whether it be climbing, running or flying, the feathers are the key to your success.

In total, you’ll need about 7 or 8 feathers to make the journey up. The way you get more of them is through completing side quests through the quirky side characters that pop up along the way, buying them, or just straight up finding them in the wild. It’s all pretty straightforward in terms of gameplay mechanics.

The characters are written well enough, with some genuinely chuckle-worthy moments sprinkled throughout their dialogue, but there isn’t any real characterization going on here. By the time I got to the climax of the game, I didn’t find myself too attached to the main character and her quest to really feel the weight of it.

While the story is a little bit of a bummer, A Short Hike has a style to it that I personally really enjoyed, but I could imagine some people would hate. Everything is overly pixelated, almost to the point of being completely overtaken by a mosaic effect. It’s like someone took a GameBoy Advance game and blew it up to a modern resolution. While that may sound odd, when it’s paired with the wonderful art direction and color palette the game boasts, it comes together pretty well.

A Short Hike isn’t just a clever name though. It’s a very short game, taking me only about an hour to beat. I did a few side quests and explored a bunch before I decided to make my way to the peak of the mountain to see where the story went. Once I got the scene up there and made my way back to the starting area, I accidentally triggered an event that resulted in the game ending and credits rolling. The game didn’t make it terribly clear that this was going to happen, but it is what it is.

I enjoyed A Short Hike for what it was, even if there wasn’t much there. It’s a calming and pleasant game that’s decent way to kill an hour or two. It’s out on Steam now for $7.99.

The Master Of Disaster: Illiterate & Rich – 04

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I don’t have a great deal of experience with Dungeons & Dragons outside of playing a few one-shots, playing in a short campaign in The Lost Mine of Phandelver, and of course DM-ing the campaign my friends and I are currently going through. But I’d like to focus in on that short campaign in The Lost Mine of Phandelver, and talk about the time one of our players decided to take up the mantle of expert accountant at the cost of his literacy.

We had a particularly greedy dwarf barbarian in our party who was always quick to gather as much loot as he could possibly carry on his mostly naked body. It was a funny bit that worked well with the rest of us because our goals were a bit more altruistic and personal in nature. But not for our enterprising dwarf. No, he was motivated purely by shiny things.

I imagine this is what our dwarf looked like

It’s when we came across a chest of gold pieces that Gravy-Train (his name was a play on the Pokemon, Graveler, but I refused to call him that) found and decided that here in this enemy infested cave was the best place to count it all. Worried that we would all be caught off guard while Gravy was counting his pennies, he flippantly posited that his character was a money-whiz, and could count a vast amount of coins in mere seconds. I think our DM was willing to concede that point, but Gravy followed it up by saying that he didn’t know how to read, but could count really well.

Me being the scamp I was demanded that this was canon and he had to commit to it. I experienced no push back from anyone, and from there on, Gravy was illiterate but could count really well.

We ended up in a library packed with books that our now illiterate dwarf could not read. While I had hoped for some sort of Twilight Zone styled Sisyphean curse where he’d lament at the vast amounts of knowledge he could no longer consume, but Gravy-Train was unphased and went ahead and told us how many books were on the shelves as if that was some great piece of intelligence he had just dumped on us.

That run down mound of garbage on the far right? That’s Gravy-Train’s Bar

Later in the campaign, Gravy-Train began to split from the party in an effort to make some deals with the town banker or something. He wanted to buy the entirety of the town if memory serves, and started by buying out the old and run down tavern on the hill. The guy couldn’t read, but had already set his plan of owning an entire city into motion. It was an amazing moment when he finally revealed that to us.

It’s the little bits of character building that I’ve come to appreciate in my time with D&D. This story may seem fairly benign in the grand scheme of things, but it made his character more tangible and real, despite being hilarious. It’s because of this that I think I’ve been so taken with D&D. I want to have more of those moments in the game, both the funny and serious alike. After destroying their world, I was presented with the unique opportunity of putting my players into a setting where they can re-contextualize everything about themselves, and maybe put them in more situations that can bring out these character moments. That’s my hope at least.

But I do wonder if we would’ve ever taught him to read again though. I’m guessing we wouldn’t. It’s funnier if he never could read again.

Blog: Junk Food Games – 07/31/19

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I found myself with a ton of free time this past weekend which enabled me to take a shallow dive into my ever expanding backlog. There were plenty of games from me to pick from, but I decided to make good on a goof I made over a year ago. I’m of course referring to the smash-hit, mega viral video sensation that took the world by storm; my video about the time I rented Uncharted: The Lost Legacy from a Redbox, and it didn’t work.

While I think the video was worth the $3 rental fee I paid, I actually did want to play the game. Now we’re here in 2019, over a year from that hilarious video, and almost 2 years from the release of the game itself, and I finally found some time to blast through it.

I really enjoy the Uncharted games, not because they’re such a joy to control or anything, but because they’re just fun blockbuster movies I get to play through. The over-the-top action, pseudo-historical, Indiana Jones-esque series has always been a consistently fun experience, and Uncharted: The Lost Legacy is no exception. In fact, it might just be the best in the series.

I could go into detail about what makes this entry so good, but that isn’t what this post is about. What I really want to talk about is how I put the Uncharted games into the same category I would a Marvel movie. They’re these high-intensity, big and expensive adventures that get me psyched out of my mind. Sometimes they leave a longer impact, (Endgame, never forget) but most of the time it’s just this exciting thing I get to be a part of for a few hours.

I won’t remember the details about Uncharted: The Lost Legacy in a few months, but I will remember how much fun I had with it. So it got me thinking about some other “junk food” games I turn to when I want to turn my mind off. In all fairness I think I’ve covered that pretty well on this site, turning to various “simulator” games, the NBA 2K series, and Cities Skylines, to name a few, but I’m always looking for a game that allows me to just turn my brain off for a while and just go for a cool ride.

Sometimes you want a game you can lose yourself in for 20 to 30 hours, fully immersing yourself in the world and what you’re doing. Then sometimes you just want to play a game where you’re firing rockets up at attacking helicopters while you’re riding on the roof of a train. Turns out, I’m looking for more of the latter these days.

Blog: Time to Unwind – 07/24/19

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Since a few days ago when I posted my piece on the first few hours with Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order, I can’t say that I’ve played much else. That isn’t because I’m so head over heels for the game, rather, I just haven’t played anything that’s really revved my engine as of late.

I feel like I write something like this every few months, where I can’t find something to hook me in and keep me occupied. Ultimate Alliance 3 has been more or less, my go to game as of late, but even with that game I can feel myself losing a little steam with. It isn’t a bad thing though. In fact, it’s given me a lot more time to focus on some of my other hobbies.

I’ve been really diving headfirst into writing, specifically working on making my Dungeons & Dragons campaign I’ve been running for a while, really fleshed out and fully formed. From designing quests, to fully realizing the NPCs and settings, all the way to making maps, I’ve been very creatively fulfilled by this in a way I haven’t been in a long time.

This is basically what I’ve been up to

Outside of that, I’m playing music again. Not in any real serious capacity, but I’ve started composing some tracks and recording them with the little equipment I have. I’ve been listening to some D&D podcasts where they create music to help heighten the tension or portray the right mood, and while I’m not looking to integrate my music into my campaign, I think it’s a fun challenge to give myself a tone and try to make a song that represents that.

But yeah, not really doing much in the way of gaming lately. It feels like I’m in this summer lull where most of the games coming out just aren’t resonating with me in any meaningful way. I’m still working through Ultimate Alliance 3 and occasionally plucking away at Super Mario Maker 2, but that’s about it for the time being.

Early Impressions: Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order

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In lieu of an introduction that recounts the entirety of the Marvel renaissance over the past decade and how this title properly capitalizes on that zeitgeist, I’m just going to go ahead and say that I’m really enjoying Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order and what it brings to the table. It’s an imperfect game that doesn’t fully deliver on the power fantasy of playing as your favorite superheroes, but it sure is fun.

For those who don’t know, Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order is a 1 to 4 player cooperative brawler with a lot of RPG elements. You get to slip into the tights of several iconic heroes and take on just about every big time villain you can think of, in an effort to collect all of the Infinity Stones. The story is largely forgettable, mostly serving as very loose connecting threads between the different supervillain themed levels, but it has enough fan service to make the cut-scenes worth watching.

But that’s not why I came to Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order. I wanted to punch, kick, and magic blast my way through every enemy I could see. In this arena, Ultimate Alliance 3 excels. Each hero has their own unique light and heavy attacks along with 4 special abilities that can be upgraded to be more effective. The combat is repetitive yet fun, and adds enough variety by forcing you to block and dodge more than you’d expect from a brawler.

Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order encourages you to really consider your team build by offering buffs based on who and what kind of characters your active 4 is comprised of. Teams like The Guardians of The Galaxy, the 2012 movie Avengers, 4 of the Spider-Man characters and so on and so forth, get special bonuses when you use them together. But even when you split the team up and get less married to team composition, Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order still rewards you with a portion of whatever active bonus you might be building towards.

For instance, having The Hulk and Thor on a team grants you half of the movie Avengers team bonuses, as well as a bonus for putting heavy-hitting characters together. All of the team compositions can be viewed in the menu which is extremely helpful considering you unlock new characters pretty quickly, and there’s something like 30 different team bonuses you can achieve.

The downside to all of this is that Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order only half explains most of its mechanics. Learning about proper team composition is fairly obvious, but finding out what category of moves your characters have access to and how those play together is kind of a mystery at first glance. There are just so many icons that each portray different abilities, or unity bonuses, or stat categories, that it’s genuinely overwhelming at first.

In addition to that, Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order kind of forces you to try out your newly recruited superheroes by making them significantly higher level than the heroes you’re currently playing as. Normally I’d say that’s a good thing to encourage people to step out of their comfort zone, but in my experience it’s only led to me ignoring team bonuses in favor of who has the highest level. So now I have the iconic team of Thor, Deadpool, Dr. Strange and Ghost Rider all hovering around level 28, while Captain America, Spider-Gwen and so many others are so under powered that using them would be me handicapping myself.

This wouldn’t be as big of a problem if it wasn’t for the fact that the difficulty spikes are fairly brutal, and require you to have a fairly robust knowledge of these 30+ characters and their strengths in battle. Sometimes you need a lot of area-of-effect and crowd control characters. Sometimes you need a balance of bruisers and ranged characters. The problem is that unless you know how these characters play or figured out the myriad of icons and tokens that denote a specific hero’s style, you’re basically brute forcing your way through situations and experimenting via extensive trial and error..

I don’t want to paint the picture that I don’t like this game, because I genuinely am enjoying it despite the issues I’ve run into. The action is fun and simple without feeling overly repetitive which is a tight rope to walk when making a brawler. There’s a stun meter that acts like enemy armor, that once depleted will stagger an enemy and allow you to attack their health directly. It adds a simple extra layer of depth to the combat that manages to keep things interesting long enough for you to get to a boss battle. And that simple loop is made better by the wide variety of characters and moves you have at your disposal.

I did wish that my attacks felt a little more powerful though. It felt a little weird to watch The Avengers struggle against a bunch of convicts in a prison and then proceed to go fight Ultron or something. But it’s a video game, and you have to be able to deal with weird logic loopholes if you want to have fun sometimes.

Minor grievances aside, the biggest problems with Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order are mostly of the technical variety. The camera is hilariously bad at times, getting locked up on some geometry, going in walls, or just zooming in and out in odd intervals in an attempt to be helpful. While the frame-rate has a tough time holding up when the action and particle effects start to kick up. The loading times are abysmally long and managed to actively keep me from completing more challenge missions considering the load to get into them was just about as long as the mission itself.

Even the AI and how the logic of the game treats them is strange. Most of the heroes at your disposal will require you to pick up red and blue orbs that represent health and energy respectively. Reasonably, the game only allows player controlled characters to pick these things up, but even if you’re filled up on health and pick up an orb, it doesn’t heal any of your teammates. It sounds like a silly thing to complain about, but it ultimately led to me favoring one character and praying that my team AI wouldn’t get themselves killed because I didn’t want to micromanage their health pickups.

I know it sounds like I’m really down on Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order, but honestly, I’m having a really good time with it. There are plenty of other things I could pick apart, but despite all of them I just want to keep playing it more. Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order is the perfect example of a game that does one thing so right, that all of the issues surrounding it don’t seem as bad.

Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order is available exclusively on the Nintendo Switch.

Blog: Coming Up Next – 07/17/19

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We’re over halfway through the year and I’ll be honest, there haven’t been any releases this year that have really blown me away. That’s why we’re going to look forward into the infinite void that is the remainder of 2019, and see what games are in store for us.

MARVEL ULTIMATE ALLIANCE 3: THE BLACK ORDER – JULY 19, 2019

It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that I’m a big fan of those ladies and gentlemen that parade around in the colorful tights. I believe they’re called superheroes in some circles. I’ve never been the biggest fan of the Ultimate Alliance games, mostly because of the very repetitive, brawler combat it boasted. It’s been a long time since I’ve played an Ultimate Alliance game, so maybe this time around I can find something to really sink my teeth into.

ANCESTORS: THE HUMANKIND ODYSSEY – AUGUST 27, 2019

On top of being one of the only games I can think of that have ever dealt so directly with the concept of evolution, Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey just looks so delightfully weird that I can’t help but want to play it. I have no clue if there’s going to be any depth to it, or if it even will be fun, but I need to know how it shakes out. In my mind, there’s a version of this game that is 99% the same, but has the creature creator from Spore so I can make nightmarish visions in a game that isn’t absolute trash.

CONTROL – AUGUST 27, 2019

Nothing like a bit of telekinesis, guns, and psychedelic shifting environments to really get the blood pumping. Or at least, that’s what they say. Control looks like a game that could easily become a sleeper hit this year. With people coming away from demos of it celebrating not only the aesthetic and gameplay, but some more surprising aspects regarding the story and the agency you have, my excitement for Control has gone from none to some, fairly quickly.

NBA 2K20 – SEPTEMBER 6, 2019

Look, this isn’t something I expect most of my readers to give a shit about, but I do. The NBA 2K series has proven to not only be the games I play when I don’t want to play anything else, but the spark that got me back into following the league in earnest. There will be nothing monumentally different about this game, but I’ll take a slightly shiner version of the game I already own for sure. Besides, I’ve gotten way more than my moneys worth out of last years entry.

BORDERLANDS 3 – SEPTEMBER 13, 2019

Look, I’ve already said my piece about Borderlands 3 and how Randy Pitchford is doing his best to tank the game before it comes out, but it seems like the best candidate for a game that my friends and I can play together. I am a little disappointed by some of the changes, or more accurately, the lack thereof, but Borderlands games are mindless fun, and if this one can nail that, then we’re golden.

THE LEGEND OF ZELDA: LINK’S AWAKENING – SEPTEMBER 20, 2019

The Zelda series has always been a weird dark spot in my gaming history. I’ve played the original along with A Link to The Past, but outside of those, I never really gelled with the traditional top-down Zelda games the way I did with the 3D ones. But once again, I’ve been somewhat taken with an adorable graphic style despite my spotty history with these kinds of games. I will buy The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening when it is released, the only question is if I’ll regret it or not.

CALL OF DUTY: MODERN WARFARE – OCTOBER 25, 2019

I’m so curious to see what a reboot of Call of Duty 4 looks like. I can’t imagine that they’ll manage to recreate the magic of the initial 2007 release, but I’d love to see them try. I think what I’m most interested in seeing is how this release is received both critically and commercially, and how the next Call of Duty game shapes up because of it. Call of Duty 4 Modern Warfare casts such a big shadow over the franchise itself for being such a monumental step forward in terms of online shooters, it’s easy to see why you’d want to go back to this particular well once more. We’ll see how it all goes down when it comes out.

THE OUTER WORLDS – OCTOBER 25, 2019

So let’s get this out in the open: I don’t like Bethesda styled RPGs. There are a myriad of reasons why, but let’s just truncate this thing by saying the word “bugs” and leave it at that. So imagine my confusion when I saw the trailer for The Outer Worlds and was actually into it. Maybe it was the setting that piqued my interest, or the possibility that this game engine might actually be able to sustain the weight of the game, but I can’t be sure. All I know is that I’m cautiously optimistic about The Outer Worlds and hope it isn’t too broken.

LUIGI’S MANSION 3 – OCTOBER 31, 2019

I only really got to play the first Luigi’s Mansion in short bursts thanks to me never actually owning a Gamecube, but it was easily the game I was most curious about playing on that console. Now that I own a Nintendo Switch and the third game in series is finally coming out on it, I can make up for that lost time. I don’t actually know what to expect from Luigi’s Mansion 3 aside from busting some ghosts with what I think is literally a vacuum cleaner, but hell, I’m up for it.

POKEMON: SWORD & SHIELD- NOVEMBER 15, 2019

I remember being a kid and playing Pokemon Red when it came out. After that I got Pokemon Yellow and was just as into it as the first one. Fast forward to 2018 when I played Let’s Go Pikachu, and we’ve just covered my entire history with Pokemon games. My experience and love for the Pokemon games are very low, but after enjoying the Let’s Go games as much as I did, I’m at least curious to see what all the fuss is about. I enjoyed the more streamlined version of Pokemon I played last year, and I know that this isn’t going to follow suit, but I’m still interested enough in it to possibly try it out. But man, when I hear things like “Dynamaxing” and “EV-Training,” my eyes start to glaze over, and my interest suddenly runs dry.

STAR WARS JEDI: FALLEN ORDER – NOVEMBER 15, 2019

It’s a Star Wars game. I like Star Wars. I like lifting fools with my magic powers and slicing my way through everything with my laser sword. I’ve heard that this game will allow me to do both, and then some. It’s been a while since we’ve gotten a real Star Wars game, now only time will tell if this one is good or not. I’m a big fan of everything I’ve seen in the footage they’ve revealed, but I’m curious to see more of the game. This might be one of the few games this year that I’m actually excited about.

UNTITLED GOOSE GAME – 2019

There’s no need for me to explain myself here, just watch the trailer.

We’re only halfway through the year, and this isn’t a comprehensive list of any kind, but I’m still hoping that something between now and the end of the year manages to really blow me away.

Blog: I Wanna Mario Maker 2, Too – 07/09/19

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If ever there was a game that was able to justify the existence of the Wii U, it was Super Mario Maker, without question. The combination of this bizarre hardware, the level building concept, and the various Super Mario mechanics that have been drilled into my head for the past few decades helped to make it one of the only level creation based games I’ve ever enjoyed. Also, the references to Mario Paint that were included were just some delicious icing on the cake.

Now there’s a sequel on the far more successful Nintendo Switch, which is great. The problem lies in the fact that while Super Mario Maker 2 does a pretty good job replicating and adapting that experience for the Switch, it never manages to feel as intuitive or easy to handle as its predecessor.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Super Mario Maker 2, but I feel like creating things without a stylus is more cumbersome and difficult than I’d like. To be fair, in handheld mode you can just touch everything on the screen and get things done that way, but I don’t want to smudge up the screen on this thing. So in place of using my fingers to make levels, I can use the built in radial menu system to pick and choose objects. It works well enough, but it’s nowhere near as intuitive as just using a stylus.

So that’s where I was with Super Mario Maker 2. I wanted to create levels, but the in game tools left me wanting. So what am I to do? I suppose I could just adjust and learn to live with this new system, adapting to the changes that they’ve made in order to get my level creation on. But this is America, and if there’s one thing I know about being an American, I can just kick and scream and throw money at the problem until I can do things the way I like them.

This is all a very long winded way of saying that I bought a stylus for my Nintendo Switch so I can play Mario Maker the way I want to. Quick correction, I actually bought a pack of ten of them on Amazon because I need more bullshit to clutter up my apartment.

But honestly, I can’t seem to even approach making levels in earnest without a stylus. I’ve mostly kept to playing the “story mode” and various online courses. I’ve dabbled I’m level building with the built in controls, but when my glut of styluses arrive, then shit gets real.